Books, authors and all things bookish

National Book Award finalists announced

October 14, 2009 | 12:37
pm

Books about Henry Ford's failed jungle experiment and a Faulkneresque novel about the lasting effects of war on memory are among the finalists for the 2009 National Book Award, which the National Book Foundation announced this morning. Five finalists were named in four categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people's literature.

The novel ... began with a strong image that Phillips had carried with her for three decades. "I was visiting a friend in Virginia, where I grew up. I looked out her window into an alley and saw a boy seated on a metal chair holding a blue strip from a dry cleaning bag. He sat there for hours." Yet another ingredient came in the form of the story of the massacre of hundreds of Korean civilians at No Gun Ri in 1950, reported by the Associated Press' Charles J. Hanley in 1999 (Hanley shared a Pulitzer with two colleagues for the story in 2000).

In nonfiction, finalists are David M. Carroll's "Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook" ((Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); Sean B. Carroll, "Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species (Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt); Adrienne Mayor, "The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy" (Princeton University Press); T.J. Stiles, "The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt" (Alfred A. Knopf); and Greg Grandin, "Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City" (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt). Times columnist and book critic Tim Rutten called Grandin's book a perfect merging of history with a novelist's sense of story:

Historian Greg Grandin has taken what heretofore seemed just such a
marginal event -- Henry Ford's failed attempt to establish a gigantic
agricultural industrial complex in the heart of Brazil's Amazon Basin
-- and turned it into a fascinating historical narrative that
illuminates the auto industry's contemporary crisis, the problems of
globalization and the contradictions of contemporary consumerism. For
all of that, this is not, however, history freighted with political
pedantry. Grandin is one of a blessedly expanding group of gifted
American historians who assume that whatever moral the story of the
past may yield, it must be a story well told.

One final note: The inclusion of David Small's "Stitches" on the young adult list comes as something of a surprise. Does this graphic novel really fall under the category of YA? Read our review, by critic Paula L. Woods, and you decide.